


nothing quite like the spotlight

by theratpope



Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games)
Genre: Drinking, Medical Experimentation, Other, Rapture (BioShock), splicers bioshock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22504558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theratpope/pseuds/theratpope
Summary: An in-depth look at the thought process and past blunders of an OC for a bioshock rp/campaign I've been running. Poor Percy got a bit screwed over, but hey, welcome to Rapture!
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	nothing quite like the spotlight

He didn’t think about looking over at his reflection in the shattered shop window besides him till it was too late.  
Cohen had done this, he thought. Well, he had done this. But Cohen had allowed it, let it slip by him like water under a bridge and with just as little a care. _'You’re replaceable now, little bird. Good art, good business, no? You had your moment in the starlight, which is so much more than so many of us can hope for…'_ Percy remembers that bright bloody lipstick smudged on the man’s teeth, and how only a few months earlier it had been trailing down his neck. His poor neck, now a collection of weeping sores. Well, at least there will be no more white tie events to choke him, he thinks with sardonic humor.

  
So, he had been left to rot, and rot he did. Left by all of them! Cobb had stopped seeing him, and Hector was drunker than even he thought possible. Martin was probably off plotting something nastier than a bar fight, and Fitzpatrick- well, he too would be replaceable soon enough. They all were in this city. And wasn’t that the point? Big, bright stars fighting to burn brighter and brighter till they exploded. But oh god, how beautiful the blast had been for those short, short years!

  
He rounds the same turnstile for the bathysphere station as he’s done a thousand times, and the unwashed tile reflects back at him from the puddles of sordid water underfoot. He’s reminded of the bunkers during the blitz, if only briefly. He has new memories to contend with those now.  
He sets off for Apollo Square. Just a few tests. Maybe they’ll even make him better. All brand new and shiny, like those sleek suits in the shop windows, or like the smiling men in the advertisements. Shiny smiles, shiny hair, shiny shiny shiny.  
And so he sets off, a skip in his squelching step.

He can’t feel anything in his limbs now, arms and legs tied down as his mutilated hands grasp out and twitch like dancing spiders. They’ve put another something inside of him, needle still slick and dripping. He laughs at his own innuendo.

Every inch of him burns. He’s naked, he’s on a table, and he’s on fire. He hadn’t been naked in a while. He’s not sure he’ll ever want to be again.

When he opens his mouth to scream, nothing comes out anymore. And when they take him up to the plasmid theater, he doesn’t struggle. There are others there and all he’ll have to do is survive. He’s gotten very, very good at it. Sometimes they scream back, wordless but for all their fire and lighting. His back arches and bends with each blow, legs dancing and twisting out of their reach, till they’re well within his and reduced to another stain on the floor. When the tinny little voice declares the obvious merits of such extraordinary home defense, and the bright lights hit his dilated pupils, he simply cannot help but dip low and take a well-earned bow.

When they’ve finally finished him (broken and rebroken and rewritten like an unsatisfactory scherzo), he doesn’t know where he’s headed. All he knows is that for all their lab coats and papers, they’ve failed to strap him down just tight enough. A whole city of hacks, he thinks listlessly. And like a brick it hits him- if it weren’t for the fathoms of ocean around him, he’d be free. He wills himself to picture the location of his old apartment (there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,) and when he finds himself falling onto the old wooden floor, he watches his thin limbs take the full force and lets his head drop off into the depths of the sea.

It takes him a little over a month to master any substantial leaps in space without throwing up all over his collar. But he learns to steady himself and use timing to his advantage. It’s a new sort of music, he thinks. And the spotlight is always craving newness.

So what if he goes off to a bar now and then? Can’t let all the damned vodka be used for the molotovs, can he? It would be a crime against industry, against proper service! He giggles into his coup glass, and swallows the contents in one gulp without ever letting his mask budge. It’s comfortable and slightly warm, a second skin that clings to his face like it belongs there. And good-fucking-god, isn’t that the little dive bar he used to make spare change in?  
He breaks into the place and finds the piano left all alone, wood twisted and weary with water damage. His fingers skirt over the keys reverently. A few moments later, he proves exactly what he fears. It’s hopeless- hopeless to move his skittish digits across the instrument he once loved, like an unsatisfactory lover who _knows_ their own inadequacy.

(He’s considered biting the bullet, but he can’t even hold a gun right anymore)

So, he drinks, and he drinks some more. And when he can, he takes the other poor bastards’ ADAM in the blink of an eye. He doesn’t touch the little girls in their pretty little blue dresses. To tell the truth, they scare him. It’s the eyes, he mutters to himself, even though his have started to look a bit funny nowadays.

He thinks about the others. They’ve been trapped like rats in a sinking ship by Cohen, while he’s far beyond anything the crazy old fool could ever hope to control now. Then why, pray tell, was he still fucking here?  
_Because Cohen’s here. Because Cohen’s here, and now it’s_ your _turn to replace_ him.  
He thinks about it for a moment as he organizes his leftover needles. The red in the coveted little vials winks back at him, reminds him of lipstick. So, Cohen had wanted more than common humanity from his song birds, eh? Well, then! He was going to show him just what humanity could do at its remarkable limits. Limits that were flaunted and torn by this city, by himself and by Cohen and by all the other shiny lab coats and spotlight whores and empty fuckers in it- burst like the blast of a shooting star.

_I’m going to teach you to scream, you old hack. But before all that, I’m going to make you sing._


End file.
